Meanwhile I borrowed a friend's 80D and played around a bit with it. I mainly used my 18-35A and 100L.
Build quality and ergonomics
I can't say that I noticed much of a weight difference with an attached lens, but the grip, being smaller, feels less comfortable to hold for me. The "inferior" body material (plastic vs. magnesium alloy) is of course visible, but I barely notice that while shooting, so I guess I could live with that. The viewfinder is a bit smaller, but otherwise not too different from the one of the 7D, so it is fine for me (I was never into the hype of the "large viewfinders are IT"... since I wear glasses, it is sometimes difficult to see the full viewfinder on the 7D).
The thumb button is indeed sorely missed... the "joypad-style" four-way controller is not located very conveniently and is also feeling much more flimsy compared to the thumb stick of the 7D. Further, the thumb wheel's usability is also hindered by the four way controller, as it protrudes from it... so I cannot really spin the wheel with a flat thumb anymore, but have to use the thumb's tip - this feels awkward and is also much slower when going through a larger number of images. In addition, my thumb then often bumps into the slightly protruding edge of the flip screen - and I do have rather lean fingers.
AF
Other things I noticed: having that many AF points surely is nice, but in the short amount of time, I already noticed myself using center point + focus & recompose at times because I just couldn't deal with the four-way controller.
I also did a lot of macro shooting. I had high hopes with the touch screen and live view AF for this style of shooting, but while it works fine and is very responsive for regular motives, it didn't seem to work all to well for macro for me... I also found it much more difficult to judge where I am aiming at when the lens was strongly defocused. Through-the-viewfinder macro shooting worked fine... I would say even slightly better than with the 7D, overall keeper rate seems to be a bit higher.
Regarding phase-detect AF through the viewfinder: it mostly worked fine, but didn't "wow" me. When shooting indoors in bad light, it reacted rather sluggish at times, I had hoped better performance, because IIRC the nominal brightness range for the AF is better than that of the 7D. I have yet to compare this against the 7D directly, though.
Responsiveness
I did my shooting using a rather old SDHC card with 8GB (from my 450D
) since I didn't have any other compatible card, so the card is probably very slow by today's standards. In particular when I fired off bursts (but still far from "buffer full"), after stopping, sometimes the camera would show a black screen with some message (along the lines of "busy") while it was writing to card, and this often took very long. A faster card will probably reduce the write times considerably, but
why does it even
block at all? Can't it just write the stuff to card in the background while allowing me to work normally (e.g., use the menu, switch to live view etc.)? But this didn't happen all the time - maybe I did something that triggers this behavior (pressing the "play" button, maybe?). In any case, I never seemed to have noticed something similar with the 7D.
Video
I am not that much into video work, but from the one or two short clips I made, I can only say that it is a night & day difference to the 7D. Videos, even though having the same nominal resolution, are just so much sharper! When looking at it full screen on a FHD screen, even individual frames look sharp. That combined with the very nice touch focus actually seem to finally make DSLR video usable for me (because I suck at MF and cannot afford hiring a focus puller to do my focusing
). Also the MP4 codec seems to be much more space efficient than the MJPEG(?)-based MOVs produced by the 7D.
The actual value of the whole video side of the 80D for myself is still questionable... maybe I discover the video guy in me, maybe I will continue ignoring it.
One main issue I had with my time with the 80D - and this is not related to the camera - is that my ancient Lightroom 4.4 doesn't support it, so I had to use DPP. While DPP seems to be getting better, it still feels much slower than Lightroom (and it also does not seem to have a feature to pre-calculate 100% previews, which speeds things up a lot for initial image selection in LR). Of course I therefore cannot really compare the results (in particular regarding noise and shadow-pushability) against my years of working with 7D RAWs in LR.
A full version of LR 6 is still >100€ here and I cannot seem to find an upgrade license anywhere, so I would have to factor that into the total cost of the 80D. And then, LR 7 is probably just around the corner... if Adobe will still make it available as purchasable software and will not fully switch to their "cloud" model here (if they do, they will have lost me as a customer, since for my needs, I will not pay ~10€ a month to replace the software I bought for ~100€ and had been using for several years, easily quadrupling the cost).
sunnyVan said:
The most noticeable difference would be build quality. 80D definitely feels somewhat plasticky compared to my 5Dmk3. Other than build quality I don't think 80D is in any way inferior. Whether or not 80D is a reasonable upgrade depends on what features you're looking for. I absolutely love the video quality of my 80D.
I can only chime in on your statement about video quality - now if it had 4K to future-proof it...
sunnyVan said:
Changing focus point using touch screen is so easy, so intuitive. I don't miss the joystick all that much. Do you care about wifi, build-in intervalometer, articulating screen, higher DR, and so forth? If you want a general purpose camera, you'll love 80D.
I briefly played around with the wifi functionality (remote control from PC). I am not sure if I fully grasp the possibilities here, but I don't think I will make much use of it (if I were a studio shooter, the direct file transfer to a tethered laptop would certainly be interesting). Maybe smartphone connectivity will be more useful, I have yet to try this.
The intervalometer is certainly something I will try out eventually, but I could also well live without it.
The improved DR everyone is raving about (but which I cannot yet judge, due to the LR "issue" I mentioned above) will definitely be something I should like, since I tend to push shadows in >50% of my images.
sunnyVan said:
If your main interest is wildlife and sports, 7Dmk2 is the camera for you. Or have you considered getting 5dmk3 instead?
The 7DII is still >1300€ here... a tad too much for my taste. On the other hand, there is still a "student cashback" promotion running here, which would allow me to save 150€ for the 7DII. But if I made use of that cashback option, then I think the camera would no be allowed to also participate in the 250€ cashback for the 100-400...
And in the end, when the 7DII came out I decided that it would gain me too little in image quality improvement over my 7D (all this based of course on internet resources, in particular the DPReview comparison tool). I think the 80D should have better image quality for my purposes, especially regarding DR. On the other hand, when comparing 80D and 7DII at higher ISO via the DPR tool
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison/fullscreen?attr18=daylight&attr13_0=canon_eos80d&attr13_1=canon_eos7dii&attr15_0=raw&attr15_1=raw&attr16_0=3200&attr16_1=3200&normalization=full&widget=340&x=0.31965145608805307&y=-0.06737939434295047
they seem on par. The 80D gives of course more pixels, but at least to my eyes, there is not much additional detail here.
Full frame is of course something I would like to have (who doesn't), but it just makes things even more expensive - the soon-to-be-replaced 5DIII is still >2350€ here (minus 300€ student cashback, though), but I would hate to part with the 18-35A and would need a new wideangle lens, and I would definitely need that 100-400 then, because the 70-200 F4 IS would clearly be too short on FF.